How to Know If Something Comes From Past Lives

Taking a deep dive into how to search through the past lives section of a soul book to find the source of an issue, lesson, or problem, ... where to look next if it isn't there, and what to do once you've found what you're looking for.

Transcript

How to Know If Something Comes From Past LIves

All of our origins begin with "Once Upon a Time..." as told to us by someone else, like a fairytale. This is because even if we are one of the very few who can retrieve memories of our infancy later in life, we don't grow up with them in any easily accessible way. What we do grow up with is the stories our family tells us about ourselves and the time period when we were a baby, getting up to all kinds of hijinks and mayhem while learning to walk, talk, and feed ourselves.

Sometimes these fairytales are of plucky heroes who are precocious, contrary, strong willed and brave. Heroes can be misunderstood for a time and often are annoying, as they seem to know better than anyone else, but as the story goes on, it shows they become appreciated for who they are, approved of relatively quickly, and get all the prizes and rewards in the end.

Other stories are like Cinderella, Snow White, or Beauty and the Beast where the focus is on how wrong the girl/princess is. However, unlike in the stories, it seems like the bad part of this never quite ends. There's no prince or good person coming to help them make "Happily Ever After". Their entire life is an experience of people important to them saying how flawed, bad, and even evil the girl/princess is because she is this when she should be that. Also, it doesn't seem to matter if she changes to do and be "that" because then the people around her just change the requirements or code what she did as bad due to her bad nature and past history. 

The thing about these stories, these "In the beginning..." fairytales, is often we can't fact check them, and we might not even realize we should. Up until recently most cultures, communities and religions supported the individual's belief in them, in their initial broken nature or manifestation of original sin, and therefore all anyone could do was work to find a way to fix what is broken (which is basically impossible) or create a means to cope.

However, as indigenous spiritual practices, modern spiritualities, holistic/integrated psychology practices and somatic therapies emerge and flourish, we have come to realize these family fairytales or myths are not describing our essential selves or some innate flaw. Instead, they can be part of cPTSD, trauma, or deep core wounding. We can therefore see these as foundational, just like they were intended to be, but as a foundation for our healing, transforming, unfolding, and progress on all levels of being. They aren't demons to fight against, stuck spots or self-sabotage, but instead the key to unlocking our potential.

To locate this key, we first need to determine where the issue(s) or behavior(s) are in time. Are they from this now or something which happened in the past, and we have carried over?

Records of our Previous Lives

The past life records in our soul book are one of the most helpful resources we have available to us for retrieving the wisdom and skills we are looking for or helping us problem solve how to acquire them. As everything we've ever done or been are recorded there in high fidelity, we can access experiences where we've already solved similar problems we're working through now. This loads the lessons learned into our DNA so we can "just know" them, much like Trinity in the Matrix learning how to fly a helicopter.

They can also act like the whiteboard at work with a list of all the things we've already tried and found aren't the solution. For any given situation, especially lessons we're working through, it's more than likely we've been working on them for a while and so have racked up experience in what not to do. Past lives, seen from a high overview or summary, can help us understand the bigger picture of what we're working through or on, and lead us towards the solutions.

One of the biggest problems people have when connecting with past lives is understanding what is being presented and why. Past life records work somewhat like ads on Google, Amazon or Facebook. What we are interested in now, what we are working through, struggling with, or becoming informs the information we see. The past lives we will be presented are specifically geared to speak to us about our life now or respond to any request we have in our hearts and minds in the moment. As our minds are often out of sync with...well...a lot of things, what we see in retrieving past lives can create confusion as to what the purpose is for the experience once we've had it or what we're meant to understand from it all.

Those who delve into their own past lives rarely receive a random sample, general overview or past life experience which is representative of the whole. Because the information is targeted to the now like a social media ad, the lives perceived will have similarities or themes and may not be representative of the person's cumulative past life experiences. For example: Someone who is trying to discover what past life is influencing this current embodiment negatively or what contracts and karma need to be resolved could receive three different past lives where they died horribly in accidents, political struggles, or due to violence. These are usually .0001% of all the lives a person has lived, but are the most relevant to what the person is expecting and/or looking for.

Past life reviews of this kind are not an overview of who the soul has been in its entirety, not a statement that the majority of their lives have ended violently, not a statement about lessons to be learned, harm which needs to be addressed or issues which are intruding into the now. However, the information is being presented - from dreams provided by our guides, readings with Akashic readers, past life regression or even spontaneous vision - as a response to our requests for help, support, and understanding and is specific to each request.

Most methods for working with past lives require us to look through them one by one like trying to find one quote in a library full of physical books. However, there are ways we can access and utilize them much more like Google or YouTube to find specific examples and answers relevant to our needs.

One is to work directly with the Past Lives section of your soul book or Akashic record. Doing so consciously is a bit different than how students learn by reading one record at a time. In fact, it can seem like having to do things in reverse. Instead of centering yourself, holding a question in your mind and then opening the book, you'll first open the book to the Past Lives section which is often the first half. Then center yourself and hold the problem to be solved in your mind and ask for ALL relevant entries which can help in the matter.

Soul books respond in a variety of ways to these types of queries. One is to provide one paragraph summaries for each life and event which is relevant. These can take up one to two pages and will appear immediately on the pages which have until this time seemed blank. Each is enterable if you need more detail, but it's often a better practice to try and see them as a collection. Patterns can then be seen, solutions can become obvious, we can even see learning curves and long-term plans easily in this way.

Books can also convert the relevant lives and experiences into "pop up" 3D presentations and will mark the sections by clumping irrelevant pages together. So, as you turn pages a new pop up will come up and each one will have information relevant to the problem.

Some will even point you towards the Past Lives Summaries held in section two and bring up the relevant sections where you have written for yourself how you've solved the problem in the past.

I have found working with a soul book for this type of problem solving can at times be cumbersome unless I'm looking for some very detailed information or to access a past version of myself to talk to them about choices they made. Going into a past life record in our soul book allows us to hold conversations with our past selves and get insights which might not be obvious from a historical record of events.

What often works better is accessing your Akashic room. Each room has an information center which includes some means of displaying past life records. Many people have a flat screen TV mounted to the wall or a blank wall which can act like a projector screen. Without the restrictions of the book format, immense amounts of information can be displayed for you in a way which allows you to target solutions without getting distracted by extraneous information, media, or past emotional attachments.

To use this method, find the area of your room where information can be easily displayed. While it can seem simple to begin working with your conscious mind and feel/think/will your questions into being, it is handy to think of this area of your room like a futuristic computer screen which is responsive to your commands, but isn't an authority which is curating things for you. Like with the internet, your wall has access to everything, but is directed by you for you. So, instead of watching everything and thinking there's some reason you need to intake all of this, use your hands to skip past things which you already understand to dig further. Separate out visuals so they play side by side and you can see the similarities and differences. You may find on a table nearby there are tools such as pointers, remotes, and even pads which can help you navigate through the data. 

It can seem complicated but actually, once you begin and as long as you don't get sucked into any one video or display, you'll get the hang of it in no time.

If the problem you're facing, no matter how complicated or mundane, is something you've already learned how to solve or navigate, you can download this wisdom into your physical body. Often there is one particular life where you not only learned the solution, but learned how to implement it with such ease it became a habit. Think of this like learning how to drive. We don't learn the lessons of driving intellectually and then think we've accomplished our task and move on to something else. Driving is something we learn in order to solve the issue of convenient transportation. We learn to do it so well we forget the individual steps it takes to do it and only notice them when something goes amiss, or we have to use a rental car which is a different make and model from our own.

But what if we look in the past and the source isn't there or we've already learned the lesson and so shouldn't be suffering its effects again?

Well, then the issue isn't from Past Lives, it's from this one. Which, to be honest, is more often the case and why doing healing work on past lives can bring temporary relief but not correct the underlying issue.

When this is the case, I sometimes refer to this as the Unreliable Narrator Problem. 

The thing is, our family, extended family, family friends and other caretakers, are not journalists. Nor are they under oath during childhood to tell us the Truth and nothing but the Truth. They are actually narrating the story of their own lives and how they are navigating the universe. We are only one part of their story and rightly or wrongly, they write our part to fit into their fairytale, not ours. So we may be written as the comedy relief, the villain, the audience who never participates, or the set-builder who just puts everything together and keeps it maintained for everyone else to play their part in the production.

Whatever we are given, taught, and learn during childhood is what we have to work with as adults. However, it can sometimes be hard to comprehend we're not stuck with these things. We can turn in this book of myths for something more relevant, we can upgrade our skills so we're able to do something more to our liking, or we can ditch it all and do something other than participate in the family drama. We already know we're able to learn since we've spent the first 12-15 years of our life learning and we've been learning new things ever since.

The challenge comes in allowing ourselves to become our own best parent and giving ourselves permission to craft, weave, and create our own narrative. To do this, it's important to become fully aware of the myths we've been bequeathed by our parents.

The issues which seem most timeless, ever present and formative I call the Apps. These are the things we're programmed with from age 0 - 3. Imagine each person is like a new smart phone. We take it out of the box, turn it on, have it update to the most current OS, and then it's a blank slate waiting to be told what to do and even be. Then the apps get installed. All of these integrate, hopefully seamlessly, with the OS giving the phone the capabilities we want. While these are programs which can be installed or uninstalled, once they are activated the OS simply sees them like a limb it can use. The more opposable thumbs the better, as it were, until they conflict with each other and cause a crash. Apps are meant to be a part of the background so the phone can focus on the data it's processing. The data is then available to the consciousness of the phone and the apps are running in the background.

As children our apps get installed and we don't keep much if any conscious memory of them. We don't remember what it was like to learn to walk. We rarely care about when and how we learned to focus our eyes. Our parents might remind us of our first word, but we don't have many or any memories of a time before speech or what it was like to learn it. Hot, cold, up, down, all installed as apps.

This is also when we learn the things we need to know in order to survive the world, or our parents' version of it, and even our parents themselves. This is where we learn some of the most core defining things about ourselves. It's where we are taught not to ask for what we want, emotions are weakness, being angry and screaming is the only way to get attention, being quiet is the only way to be safe and much, much more. During these years we are forming our core self, and this includes a heavy dose of survival traits and parental fairytale programming.

Apps often will not respond to our logical mind or our will and desires. They are running underneath this conscious data in our survival systems of fight/flight/freeze. They are in our limbic system where our brain stem or lizard brain, our spinal cord and nervous system are keeping the OS up and running. But they can be uninstalled and like our social/behavioral legacy, the first step is awareness. 

Locate one of these apps, something small, discrete, or low on the priority list. Something which you can bear to think about or consciously look at for more than a heartbeat or two without collapsing. Something which is a repeated pattern of behavior or something "just the way you are" which you know is holding you back.

Once you've picked something, do whatever works best for you to get into a meditative state. This should be relaxed, not forced, and should leave you in your body and attentive to it somewhat like Savasana at the end of a yoga class. Have paper and a pen near you to jot things down. You won't need to ask your body about it. Just focusing your awareness on it will start so much information, energy, and emotions flowing you'll have plenty to work with. Note what physical sensations you have, what information you get, what urges you have. Be gentle with yourself, graceful, patient, and unhurried. Apps are potent things which are highly reactive and protective. The more you can hold them with respect the easier things will go.

Once you have located the app, creating an awareness of and relationship with it, you can begin to uninstall it. I don't often recommend this, as it can be immensely challenging for any individual because it means changing our core sense of self. It means while we will keep our memories of everything we have been and experienced, we will be relinquishing old programming which says "I am this" so we can take on a new application which supports us in being something else. Doing this alone, without support can be frustrating or even traumatizing and can actually block healing or future healing attempts.

This type of healing can happen spontaneously through a dark night of the soul, a traumatic or triggering event, or something which brings on spiritual awakening. These types of experiences aren't something which can be initiated consciously or controlled by the will. They can also be damaging and take years or even decades to work through to their conclusion.

For those who want to heal the myths of this survival programming, I recommend working with a healer, life coach, or therapist who is trained in somatic therapies. These are practices where the practitioner is not attempting to have you remove something, release, or empty out, but instead to help you recognize the uninstall program already inside you and support you in activating it. Ayurvedic or indigenous culture healers are often well versed in supporting people through this type of process. Life coaches or therapists who have trained in Somatic Experiencing or integrative psychology are usually well versed in this process as well. Please note, this type of deep core issue healing requires a good fit between both parties and one size most definitely does not fit all. If a healer, coach or therapist isn't a good fit for you, let them go with thanks and keep looking.

Whether our issues are something we brought with us from past lives which we need to continue working on or it's something which occurred here during our childhood, the things which keep us stuck or cause us the most pain and heartache can be healed. We can choose the fairytale we live, not just the ending of one given to us by someone else. 

So, start again, "Once Upon a Time When I Became the Narrator..."